Senior police officers today gave a devastating account of Britain’s failure to plan and resource efforts to rebuild Iraq’s force after the invasion, enabling woefully trained officers to be heavily infiltrated by insurgents and militias.
The United States was also to blame for failing to grasp the importance of a functioning police service, preferring instead to chase accelerated deadlines that demonstrated results on paper – rather than on the ground – before the presidential election in 2004, according to evidence heard at the Iraq Inquiry, which has resumed public hearings after a break of almost four months.
Problems for the British contingent were exacerbated by a lack of funding and support, which derailed a proposal for Special Branch to help the new Iraqi spy agency to form a specially trained unit to hold suspects – something that might have improved Iraq’s notorious detention facilities.
Lack of money also meant that British police officers had to push on without sufficient staff, share mobile phones and even struggle to book flights to countries in the region if they needed to travel as part of their work.
In another embarrassing revelation for the Ministry of Defence, the Chief Constable who led Britain’s police effort in Iraq said that he banned his officers from using the Snatch Land Rover because of its vulnerability to roadside bombs, the biggest killer of coalition forces in Iraq. A number of families of soldiers who died in the vehicle are suing the MoD for negligence in allowing continued use of the Snatch Land Rover, which became known as a “mobile coffin” after its failings started to be understood.
Advertisement
Chief Constable Paul Kernaghan, the International Policing lead for the Association of Chief Police Officers from 2001 to 2008, described Britain’s police assistance effort in Iraq as “small, unambitious and lacking in strategic impact”.
In a statement released by the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war, he said: “There was never a clear focus on providing sufficient numbers of senior and high quality personnel to staff this key function. The military did it because no one else was willing to post the required police experts. Failings were not confined to the UK, with the US posting some individuals with extremely narrow experiences of policing and none whatsoever of counter-insurgency policing.”
Mr Kernaghan said that a sense of political correctness prevailed among diplomats, who shirked away from using phrases such as “occupying power”.
“There was a real sense of denial and a lack of objective yet constructive ongoing reappraisal of the mission. Some utterances in recent years do not chime with my memories of the views certain individuals expressed at the time,” he said.
“I do not believe that there was ever a clear, comprehensive, realistic strategic plan for policing in Iraq.”
Advertisement
Also giving evidence was retired Deputy Chief Constable Douglas Brand, the chief British police adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior from 2003 to 2004.
He was critical of the unrealistic timelines for boosting the Iraqi police, set by the US-led coalition, and lack of money and manpower attached to the mission, which was seen as key to allowing coalition troops to withdraw, but treated as an after-thought overshadowed by the task of rebuilding the Iraqi Army.
“There seemed to be this sort of expectation that the police would just sort of rise up like a phoenix and get on with things as they do,” Mr Brand told the inquiry.
Mr Brand, who was based in Baghdad but made a number of trips to Basra, where the main British effort was focused, recalled a desire to train 30,000 policemen in 30 days. He also noted that the agreed estimate was to have about 70,000 officers on patrol within 18 months – an exercise that should have taken five years.
“I did find it rather strange that otherwise well-informed professional thinkers could imagine that you could just create a police,” he said. “It takes a lot of time to develop the skills.”
Advertisement
He said that Britain enjoyed a position of influence inside the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq after the downfall of Saddam Hussein. However, a lack of money to support that position meant that good ideas fell flat.
Mr Brand recalled discussions about the development of a new Iraqi intelligence service.
“An opportunity arose for us to influence the direction that the Iraqi intelligence service, whatever it was going to be, was going to go,” he said.
“I argued over a series of meetings with the intelligence services from a number of different countries that if we had a sort of Special Branch system like we have in the UK, where the intelligence service does the intelligence work and the arresting and locking up is done by a police agency, that gives a useful balance.”
Paul Bremer, the American Ambassador in charge of the CPA, supported the idea. However, Mr Brand said: “I could not get a Special Branch manager, or somebody retired, who had that skill of being able to take the concept to a reality, and so we lost the opportunity and that disappeared.”